Trying to design and implement your own chemotherapy program is a bad idea. There’s good reason chemotherapy drugs are available through prescription only. Most are rather poisonous.

The “therapeutic ratio” for chemotherapy drugs tends to be low. Therapeutic ratio refers to the dosage that would do some good divided by the dosage that would result in death. In some areas of medicine great progress has been made in developing drugs with low therapeutic ratios – for instance the dangerous barbiturates of the past have been replaced with much safer sleeping aids – over-the-counter drugs and prescription alike.

The traditional chemotherapy drugs often have high therapeutic ratios. The newer targeted therapy drugs often have lower therapeutic ratios – which is one reason the medical community is interested in them.

In any case, it would be difficult to get chemo drugs you know are authentic. Buying prescription drugs without a prescription is dangerous anyway – responsible pharmacies won’t sell to you. Even internet sites that offer widely used prescription drugs may not offer chemotherapy drugs, because of the low internet demand for them, and possible high cost.

Note that trading or obtaining chemotherapy medicines from your friends and neighbors is not a good idea, and getting them from people you do not know through Craigslist or a similar site is an even worse idea. Taking charge of your treatment is admirable in some ways, but these drugs are too dangerous for lay people to be using without supervision from medical professionals.

Tangentially related: Brown-bagging chemo